CHE on ArXiv & its added features

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ArXiv creates archived comment system

By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

INSTANT FEEDBACK: Compared with scholars in other academic fields,
physicists have a reputation for forging ahead in the digital landscape.  
The World Wide Web came out of a particle-physics lab, and physicists
pioneered the concept of making scientific papers freely available to all.  
For more than a decade, physicists have been posting their manuscripts on
a public database, known as ArXiv (http://www.arxiv.org), even before they
submit the work to journals for publication. Now the same preprint site,
hosted by the Cornell University Library, is taking another leap forward:  
creating an archived comment system to accompany the papers.

The process works like this: A physicist with a blog writes about a
particular paper in ArXiv and links to that paper. Using a protocol called
TrackBacks, the blogger's Web site sends a notification, or a "ping," to
the ArXiv site, which then provides a link to the blog next to an abstract
of the original paper. Now anybody who examines a paper on ArXiv can read
what others have written about it.

In theory the process will promote a more free-flowing exchange of ideas
among scientists. In the past, physicists would react to papers by talking
in hallways or writing formal responses. The new process allows them to
offer "quicker feedback that wouldn't necessarily otherwise propagate very
widely," says Jacques J. Distler, a professor of physics at the University
of Texas at Austin. He has lobbied for such a system for years in
conversations with Paul Ginsparg, a professor of physics at Cornell who
started ArXiv in 1991 and now serves as an adviser. Mr. Ginsparg asked the
library staff at Cornell to enable TrackBacks, which they did late last
month.

Most of the comments on ArXiv so far appear to come from Mr. Distler. Only
a handful of physicists have blogs and can take advantage of the option
right now, he says. But he expects more to follow as they learn about the
feature.

The system won't allow just anybody to comment on papers. "We imagine that
blogs associated to professional physicists, or other professional
academics in other fields, will be permitted," says Mr. Ginsparg in an
e-mail message. The ArXiv software is set up to reject TrackBacks from
anonymous sites. "The aim, as ever, is to avoid anything remotely
resembling Usenet-newsgroup-type free-for-alls," he writes.

Copyright 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education